


Cookies and Sympathy

by Sholio



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Baking, Concussions, Cookies, Families of Choice, Family Feels, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-24 13:43:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17101688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Ward has a concussion; Colleen keeps an eye on him. Set post-S2.





	Cookies and Sympathy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [buhdderkupp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/buhdderkupp/gifts).



After wandering through hospital corridors and explaining to a duty nurse that she was here to pick up her brother-in-law (only the tiniest stretching of the truth ... okay, maybe a moderate amount of stretching), Colleen found herself standing outside a curtained alcove in the ER. She took a deep breath and tapped lightly on the wall. "Hello?" she called, and when no one answered, she cautiously pulled the curtain back, just enough to peek inside. "Hi. Ward?"

He wasn't in a compromising position ( _thank goodness_ ), just wearing scuffed and bloody street clothes and lying with his arm thrown over his face. He lowered it and blinked at her dazedly for a minute before he finally said, "You're not Danny."

"No," she said, managing to keep her smile on the inside, because he looked too miserable to laugh at. "I'm not. Danny is halfway to upstate with the rest of them, chasing someone who apparently calls himself The Kangaroo."

"Yeah," Ward said, closing his eyes, "I know. How do you think I ended up driving into a telephone pole? That's what happens when a leaping idiot lands on your windshield from six stories up. Or at least that's what I'm told happened. I don't actually remember for sure, because, concussion."

"What were you even doing there?"

"Dropping Danny off," Ward snapped. "That's the last time I do him a favor. Why aren't _you_ out with Team No Common Sense, anyway?"

"Because I had things to do," she said, and hastily changed the subject before he could ask what sort of things. "Anyway, Danny asked me to pick you up and keep an eye on you." While there were a lot of things she'd rather do with her evening than babysit Ward Meachum, she honestly felt like it was the least she could do considering that she'd picked tonight of all nights not to go along. She hadn't thought that it would be necessary. As she'd said to Danny, how much trouble could someone called The Kangaroo turn out to be?

Famous last words.

"You don't need to," Ward said without opening his eyes.

"Ward, I drove all the way across town to pick you up, and I'm not going to tell Danny I turned right around and left without you."

"Has anyone told you that your bedside manner is terrible?"

_"Ward."_

"Okay, fine," he muttered, and sat up, very carefully. He looked absolutely terrible, as white as the sheet under him, which mitigated her annoyance somewhat.

"Are you sure they're supposed to be releasing you from the hospital?" she asked.

"It's just a concussion," Ward said, eyes screwed shut. "I've had them before. You were even around for it."

"I guess you know what you're doing," she murmured. She watched him very carefully ease off the bed, and grope around for the wall, still with his eyes shut, until she couldn't take it anymore and moved forward to insert herself under his arm as a human crutch.

"Hey," Ward said faintly.

"I'd rather not take an hour to get to the car. I _was_ in the middle of something, you know."

But she didn't rush him and went his speed, which was slightly faster than snail-paced. While she was signing discharge paperwork at the front desk, her phone vibrated with a text from Danny.

_How's Ward?_

_Grouchy but okay, I think,_ she texted back.

_Thanks so much for doing this._

_Where are you, anyway?_ she replied.

_Poughkeepsie. Don't ask._

"Is that Danny?" Ward asked, leaning on the wall with his head in his hands. "Tell him I'm going to kick his ass."

She dutifully relayed this. Danny texted back: _Does that mean he's finally going to spar with me? Awesome!_ and added a heart-eyes emoji.

Colleen laughed. Ward looked like he thought she was laughing at him, so she said, "It's Danny. He wants to know if this means you're going to spar with him."

Danny had gone on to say: _Seriously, I'm sorry about this. Tell Ward I'm sorry, I didn't want him to get hurt._

"And he says he's sorry."

"He said that already," Ward muttered. "Can we just. Go somewhere I can lay down."

_I'm taking him home. I don't think he's really mad at you. Stay safe and don't let the Kangaroo jump on you._

_What is my life anyway,_ Danny texted back. 

 

*

Ward was uncharacteristically quiet in the car, which Colleen decided to appreciate while it lasted. She managed to get him upstairs and all the way to the couch before he suddenly looked around and said, "This isn't my place."

"No, it's the dojo. I told you, I have things to do. You'll just have to hang out with me this evening."

"My clothes are at my place," Ward complained.

"You can wear some of Danny's." She pointed him at the bedroom and went into the kitchen.

All was quiet for awhile, and her hands were covered with flour when suddenly Ward said from the bedroom doorway, "Are you making ... cookies?"

Colleen glanced around at the kitchen, where every square inch was covered with cookie-making supplies and racks of cooling cookies, then at him, and decided not to answer.

"I'm concussed," Ward said testily. "I'm slow on the uptake." He was wearing a set of Danny's sweats that didn't quite fit him, and his hair was damp. Carefully, moving like his bones were made of glass, he limped across the room and sat down slowly on the couch. "Seriously, though, you stayed home from fighting evil to _bake cookies?"_

"It's for the center," Colleen retorted. "Tomorrow is the annual bake sale that's like, one of our major fundraisers. There's a gingerbread house contest and a tree-decorating thing and I promised to help supply the cookie table, and not even The Kangaroo is standing, or leaping, in the way of that." She shook a batter-covered spoon at him. "I swore Danny to secrecy. I am now swearing you to secrecy. If you breathe a word of this to anyone ... I used to be with the Hand, you know."

Ward lay down on the couch. "You know, you could just buy a bunch of cookies and take them out of the packaging and say that you made them."

"I'm going to pretend you didn't say that."

There was peace and quiet for awhile. She took out a batch of lemon drops, put in a tray of snickerdoodles, and decided maybe she needed to make sure he hadn't died in his sleep.

"Ward?"

No answer.

Not that she was worried _exactly,_ but ... she wiped her hands on a dish towel, went over and crouched down next to him. "Hey, Ward," she said, poking his arm.

His eyes didn't open, but he muttered, "You don't have to do the waking people up every hour thing, you know. That's a myth."

"Just making sure you haven't died."

He opened his eyes, squinting. "No, I only wish I would. I guess whatever you're doing over there probably smells appetizing to most people but it's not a lot of fun when you're concussed and nauseated, trust me."

"Oh," she said. "I didn't think of that." She hesitated. She hadn't really meant to offer, but ... "Ward, do you want me to try to heal you?"

After a hesitation, Ward said, "I'm not sure I like the sound of that 'try'."

"I've never tried to heal a head injury before. I just don't know how well it'll work. But I might be able to do something about your headache." She smiled. "If I screw up, you already have some brain damage, so what's a little more, right?"

Ward stared at her.

"That was a joke," she said awkwardly. "I'm not going to ... I mean ... Look, if you don't want me to do this, just say so."

He closed his eyes with a sigh and sank back onto the couch pillows. "Honestly, if it helps even a little, I'm up for it. Just try to leave me at least a few functional brain cells. I do have a company to run, you know."

Colleen laid her hand carefully on his forehead. His skin was cool to the touch. She concentrated, but it was a struggle, trying to get the Fist to come to life -- as difficult as the first few times she'd done it.

She had used the Fist to heal herself on more than one occasion, but she hadn't yet done it on someone else, the way Danny had done on her. There was an odd intimacy to it, and she wasn't entire sure she wanted that kind of intimacy with Ward, of all people. Some part of her was holding back. He'd still be okay if she didn't do this; he could heal in the normal way. She didn't _have_ to.

Still, he was part of her life now; there was no way around that. He'd been part of her life ever since Danny had walked into her dojo and inextricably dragged the Meachums along with him. Ward had been her enemy at first, then, gradually, a reluctantly tolerated in-law of sorts, occasionally even an ally in a fight. Not really a friend, but ...

Colleen smiled to herself a little. Growing up as an only child and an orphan, she'd always had a romantic idea of family. She had imagined being part of a family would be like something on TV or in a book, wonderful and warm and full of companionship. It would mean never being alone again.

But the thing about family was, they were people you didn't even _want_ in your life half the time. They were people you were stuck with, as much as people you actually wanted. Sometimes having a family meant desperately wishing that you _could_ be alone if only they'd just get out of your hair. But they were there anyway, when you needed them and when you didn't even want them.

She felt her fingers warming against Ward's cool skin as her chi gathered and coalesced and flowed through the growing connection between them. She could feel the strain on her body and, remembering how Danny had collapsed after healing her, tried to control it; there was no Bakuto here to help her if she overexerted herself. But this was no life-or-death matter, either. She just wanted to ease his pain, soothe the bruising and discomfort.

When she started feeling lightheaded, she pulled her hand back, breaking the contact. She swayed anyway and caught herself on the arm of the couch.

"Whoa," Ward said, reaching out to catch her as he sat up. "You okay?"

"Yeah. Just dizzy. Give me a minute." She grinned at him. There was more color in his face, and maybe it was just the chi-drop from using the Fist, but she found herself feeling light, almost euphoric; she wanted to laugh. "How do you feel?"

"Better," he said, sounding surprised. He turned his head cautiously, touched his forehead, and grinned. "Still got kind of a headache, but it's not like someone's sticking an ice pick in my ear."

A smell of burning cookies penetrated Colleen's post-healing chi high. "My snickerdoodles!"

She jumped up to rescue the cookies and then reeled and just barely managed to stagger to the counter to hang on while waiting out a head rush. Okay, yeah, that _did_ take it out of her. 

"I got it," Ward said. Having followed her into the kitchen, he reached for an oven mitt and pulled out her tray of cookies. "Uh ..." He looked around at the kitchen, which was swamped in cooling cookies spread out on racks and, when she'd run out of those, on tinfoil. "Where do you ..."

"Hang on." Colleen crammed a couple of sugar cookies into her mouth and unrolled more tinfoil. She needed glucose to counteract the hypoglycemia; over the last few months, she'd definitely figured out why Danny used to eat like a horse. It was better than hypoglycemia.

"Are we allowed to eat them?"

"We are if we've just depleted most of our chi while healing people," she said indistinctly, spraying crumbs.

"Oh," Ward said.

When her mouth was clear, Colleen said, "Yes, Ward, you can have a cookie. We need to eat the burned ones anyway." She smiled and added, "You _must_ be feeling better."

"I'm feeling a lot better. I'm starving, actually."

"That's chi depletion. We should probably eat something other than cookies or we're going to regret it in an hour or so."

She found some leftover pizza and microwaved it, in between babysitting batches of cookies. Ward moved a batch of peanut butter drops from one of the stools at the counter so he could sit on it, and sampled from various batches of cookies until Colleen shoved a plate with a slice of pizza in front of him, followed by a bowl with a mixing spoon.

"Is this a hint?"

"I could use the help," she said. "If you don't know how, you can still mix things."

"Hey," Ward said, affronted. "I can bake cookies."

Colleen's eyebrows went up. "Really?"

"Yeah, with Joy." His face went a little wistful. "After Dad 'died' ..." He made air quotes with the hand not holding the slice of pizza. "-- I was Joy's, well, her everything, I guess. And yeah, we had people to do the cooking and cleaning and stuff like that, but sometimes she just wanted to do something like get up at midnight and make cookies together. So we did."

Colleen turned away and busied herself measuring ingredients into another bowl. She'd never thought about how young they both must have been. Ward, she knew from talking to Danny, had been eighteen when his dad died and the company landed in his lap, which also meant he would have been suddenly responsible for an orphaned, grieving teenage sister.

"What do you know how to make?" she asked. "Cookie-wise, I mean."

"The basics, I guess. Chocolate chip. Sugar cookies. Joy and I used to make and decorate them. I mean," he added, sounding a little embarrassed, "it's been years, so don't expect much."

"That's why we have recipes. Oh, I didn't even think about decorations. I bet they'd sell better if they were prettied up a little."

She put him in charge of sugar cookies, and while there were a few awkward moments at first, Colleen was genuinely surprised at how quickly they settled into a smooth working rapport. This was actually ... fun. Certainly more fun than doing it by herself. And she would never have expected that.

They were in the middle of decorating an array of variously shaped cookies from little bowls of colored icing when the door opened and Danny came in. "Hey! It smells amazing in here. -- Ward! You look a lot better than the last time I saw you."

"It'd be hard for me to look worse," Ward said dryly. He looked up from measuring drops of food coloring into one of the icing bowls, stopped for a minute, and then said carefully, "What in the _hell_ are you covered with?"

Colleen turned around from putting another batch of sugar cookies into the oven and stopped, too.

"Glue," Danny said dismally. "Turns out The Kangaroo was working with a guy who calls himself -- don't laugh -- Paste Pot Pete. .... I can hear you laughing, Ward."

"So he threw a pot of glue at you?" Colleen said when she was pretty sure she'd mastered her urge to burst into giggles.

"No, he shot me with a -- stop laughing, Ward -- with a glue gun. Literally." Danny peeled off his shirt with some effort and dropped it on the floor with a squelch. "Luke got it worst, because he though it was an actual gun and stepped in front of me. I just got, well. Splattered."

He reached for a cookie, but Colleen, staying out of reach, poked him away with a spoon. "That sounds disgusting. Please stay away from the food."

"How do you think it feels being covered in this stuff?" Danny asked plaintively. "Okay, fine. I'm taking a shower. I'll be out in about a year."

He vanished into the bedroom. Ward looked at Colleen, eyes bright with humor at his brother's expense, and as soon as their eyes met, she couldn't stand it anymore; she doubled over and muffled her giggles in a wadded-up dish towel.

"Colleen?" Danny called after a moment, just as she was managing to get herself under control.

She took a few deep breaths. "Yes?"

"... I'm glued to the bathroom doorknob. Help?"

"Just a minute!" she choked out, and buried her face in the dish towel again.

Ward patted her shoulder. "I'll take this. I owe you one."

He left the room, and a minute later, she heard his and Danny's voices, not quite loud enough that she could make out what they were saying, but she could hear Ward's amusement and Danny's growing irritation. There were a few thumps, too.

"If you break anything, you get to fix it!" she called, and then smelled burning sugar and, with a tiny yelp, went to take out another batch of cookies and add them to the pile. It was okay if there were a few more overcooked mistakes; there were plenty of people to eat them.


End file.
